January 2012

01/29/2012

I remember the day I first met Earl Parker back when I started out working for Big Brother magazine in 1992. The day I showed up for work to get to know everyone—mainly to get some film—that’s when Jeff Tremaine had Earl take me over to South Bay Photo. I couldn’t help but notice that Earl was a little different. When driving in his car to get the film, Earl had made a bong that was attached to the driver side door with a hose that would reach to his mouth, and he would smoke pot while he was driving his car. He would be packing weed, trying to light the bowl, taking hits, and steering his car at the same time. It was crazy! I looked over at him kind of confused and said something like, “Shouldn’t we just wait until we get there to get high?” Not for Earl. When he wanted to do something he pretty much did whatever he felt like doing, which usually was the case because he was a free-spirited individual.

There’s one thing I had in common with Earl: We both shared a passion for photography. Earl would always talk about becoming the master at street photography, like being able to shoot pictures without anyone knowing their picture was being taken. Earl also seemed to have some knowledge about what cameras to use to get the best photo when shooting covert-style.

For some reason though, Earl was never able to keep anything for long. He’s very careless and would always lose everything—even his camera. All that nonsense happened like 20 years ago, but when jackassworld.com was still around, Jeff and I bought Earl a digital camera. When he opened the gift his eyes lit up and was really excited! This was the first camera he’d had in over five years and he was ready to hit the streets again.

I really have no way to describe his shooting style or anyone that I could compare him to, but I know he really likes to take pictures of buildings, street signs, bums sleeping, girls’ behinds, and anything with a lot of color. He also has a good eye for composition and can capture some great images, but he usually ends up burning out and giving up.

When I started filming this short video on Earl it was right before I started making jackass 3D, so I had to stop and put all my energy into making the movie and shelve the project for a while. Now that I have more free time, I’ve decided to open up the files again and finish what I started out to do: Show you the beautiful mind of Earl Parker.

This latest version performs much faster and is less of a hassle tochange, edit and add things whenever I want. So look forward to morecontent uploaded more frequently.

It’s also got a new and improved look and gives me the ability to postvertical photos without any restrictions.

I really love having my own little corner of the Internet to share what’sgoing on in my little world, but this is going to be a continuous work inprogress. I’m learning as I go, so it’s not always going to be perfect inhere. It’ll be more like a fairly clean house with a few dishes in the sinkand maybe a pair of socks or two on the floor (and maybe an un-flushedtoilet every once in a while), but I’ll do my best to keep things as tidy aspossible.

But Rick, why change it now?

Well, one reason is that I finally have full control over my site and cando whatever the hell I want with it.

But more importantly, I’m making changes because you guys arestopping by and hanging out. My audience is awesome and my siteshould be as well.